Cheney lecture, Feb. 6, 1999, Orlando, Florida - part 3, pages 9 - 12

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

I transcribed this Cheney lecture for my daughter, because she is unable to

listen to tapes. This may be the most helpful section of the lecture,

because in it he discusses something people with CFIDS can perhaps do

something about--glutathione deficiency.

If anyone has corrections to make to this transcript--I couldn't figure out

what some words were--I'd appreciate it. I will not be transcribing the new

videotape, but someone just told me that it's a lot better than this tape,

so buy it if you can. Carol S., on this list, has posted information.

Sue B.

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Cheney lecture, Feb. 6, 1999, Orlando, Florida - part 3, pages 9 - 12

LIVER

It turns out that the organ system most responsible for how you feel, or

whether you feel bad, is your liver. If your liver doesn't work you are

rapidly poisoned by the lowest common denominator of the body, and the

lowest common denominator of the environment. Indeed, the poor circulation

is so toxic that if you were to remove the liver you would probably start

seizing from toxic encephalopathy in a matter of minutes. The poor

circulation in extremities is an extremely toxic place, only modulated by

the toxicity of the bowel. There are other obvious external toxicity

factors and other internal toxicity factors, but we believe that the

toxicity of this disease is centrally bound up with this disorder of detox

functionality brought on by this heavy RNaseL activity.

The first people to actually measure this were these patients being

poisoned by their own bodies. This is a group out of Newcastle near Sydney

Australia, headed by and McGregor. 's a brilliant

biochemist, and they would do lipid?/liquid? hypersomethingchromatography

(?) on urine and measure essentially metabolites coming from microorganisms

in the g.i. tract.

And they found, this is my attempt to freehand draw a urine chromatograph

(?) and I'm sorry about it, but, at any rate each of these spikes

represents a metabolic waste product--could be human waste or non-human

waste. Many of these are toxic although not all of them are toxic. But they

found in position 12, which they labeled chronic fatigue syndrome urinary

marker 1, this particular toxin correlated very well with their measure of

symptomology of this disease. So they called it CF (?) Sum (?) 1. They

would subsequently find others in these chromatographic technologies that

also related to subsets of symptoms.

This is the correlation co-efficients for CFS Sum 1, against all the major

symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome. Also another one-- CFS 2 (?)--you can

see it doesn't quite span as many symptoms as CFS Sum 1 and beta alanine,

which is a bacterial xenobiotic.

With regard to xenobiotics, the g.i. tract is of course a significant

source of xenobiotic toxicity, but a major source of xenobiotic toxicity

are root canal teeth. Root canal teeth can be easily infected with

microorganisms about 60% of the time, anaerobes (?) about 40% of the time,

candida species. And these species sit in the labrynth of the teeth--the

so-called dentin, which is like a piece of dead coral in a root canal

tooth. And these things can elaborate huge xenobiotic toxicities,

molecules, that in the absence of effective detox, can really lay you low.

These are actually some of the important enzymes of energy production

inhibited to the tune of 90% by these toxins, done by the toxicology lab at

the University of Kentucky. These are three patients whose root canal teeth

were extracted and sent to the University of Kentucky and measured for this

toxicological feature. This is normal, and this is the level of inhibition

of phosphoglycerine (?) kinase, an important enzyme in energy production.

And so the point is, again, in the absence of effective detoxification, you

become sick to the lowest common denominator of toxicity in your body, and

that may be your gut--in most people--root canal teeth in some people,

cavitations in some people, and environmental toxins can be the tip of the

iceberg for this.

So this little diagram sort of demonstrates this. The bowel is a source of

toxins, the toxins are the little green balls, the root canal and

cavitation are a source of toxins, the liver sits here, and by phase 1,

phase 2 detoxification can convert or transform these toxins into water

soluble forms, which are then excreted in the kidney. If that doesn't

happen, these fat soluble, often fat soluble, toxins get loaded into fat

structures of the body, particularly the central nervous system, and in

particular the deep structures of the brain surrounding the hypothalamus,

which is very leaky from a blood/brain perspective. And so these things can

load into the brain and cause significant neurotoxicity. Obviously root

canal cavitation production of these has a direct access to the brain

because they can actually bypass portal circulation.

GLUTATHIONE

So we began to focus more and more on glutathione deficiency, because it

was the one feature of detoxification failure that was being seen over and

over and over again, and if you look at this particular molecule I think

you begin to appreciate as you read about it that the glutathione molecule

is the central detox molecule for the cell.

And we found evidence of whole blood glutathione depletion compared to

normal population and evidence of functional impairment by urinary lipid

peroxide elevation, which would be expected in a setting of whole blood

glutathione depletion.

In addition we found a peculiar deficiency of selenium within the white

cell compartment, not so much other places, as more severely expressed in

the white cell. Selenium deficiency would profoundly affect glutathione

functionality. Also, if you found glutathione deficiency, you would expect

to see significant problems with Vitamin E and if you want to measure a

vitamin deficiency in this disease, the most severe one is Vitamin E.

Glutathione and Vitamin E are important (...?), they sort of couple to each

other, and they recycle each other, so deficiencies in glutathione will

lead to excessive consumption of Vitamin E. You see this severe depression

of Vitamin E here.

With regard to glutathione, a fact that's little known and little

recognized, is that glutathione is an important and very powerful

anti-microbial. This is a study published out of PNAS (?) BY Falci,

no less, of the NIAID, which showed that in HIV culture systems within

four days of culture you can get logarhythmic growth of HIV by injecting a

chemical known as 4-ball (?) ester. It's a very powerful inducer of viral

replication. But if you raise the glutathione level to just 15

millisomething (?) in the same culture disc, and reapply the 4-ball (?)

ester, you get absolutely no response from the HIV.

In other words, glutathione is probably one of the best anti-virals there

is. And the converse is true. In glutathione deficiency you become

susceptible to whatever is in you, and it can then activate.

With regard to the selenium issue, there are viral genes expressed in HIV.

These genes are also found in other lytic types of viruses such as

hepatitis B and hepatitis C; they are also suspected in HHV6, strain A,

which is a lytic virus. These genes can encode selenium proteins, which

consume large numbers of selenium atoms, which results in selenium

depletion at the cell level, glutathione deficiency and ultimately

apoptotic cell death. So the presence of these viruses that carry this gene

can preferentially knock out glutathione systems.

So to conclude, glutathione has potent anti-viral properties; CFS patients

are glutathione-deficient; glutathione deficiency has potent pro-viral

effects; selenium protein (?) in cutting (?) genes could provide a

significant survival advantage (something?) to the viruses.

I'll present this at the workshop this afternoon--ways, in this case

nutritional ways, to support and build up this glutathione system, which if

you don't do, it's very difficult to help these patients to detoxify from

whatever. In fact, their primary detoxification system is impaired.

Thank you.

(The afternoon workshop transcript was posted previously, as were sections

1 and 2 of this morning lecture.)